Yet now I am feeling this way on a long term basis not just for a day like I was here.

This ride of ‘no addictions or obsessions’ has suddenly transformed itself. Up until now, I’ve been careening at break-neck speed, through the pitch blackness, on a hairy, frightening, roller coaster; being tossed around like a rag-doll, completely out of emotional control. But suddenly, an abrupt change has occurred. Suddenly I’m finding myself in a place of absolute quiet stillness. It feels like I’m riding on a smooth white platform that’s silently and swiftly skimming across the surface of a pale blue, sparkling, glassy sea.

It is my belief that the above passages infer that every person (and not just Christians I might add) on planet earth carries a piece of our holy creator within themselves. From the president of the United States to the people who call the streets their home… everyone carries a piece of the Holy God… an image of Him… inside their persons (however, those who heed God’s call to Jesus the saving Christ, have a soul redeeming relationship).

Something very interesting happened tonight that I thought you would like to hear about. I’m taking training to be on the Crisis Call Center hotline. This evening we did role playing with the trainers for the first time in the training. Well I did a pretty piss-poor job of it and the feed-back I got from the others showed that too. This would have been a perfect ‘set up’ for me to rail against myself you think, wouldn’t it? This would have been the perfect situation for the ‘ugly voices’ to have come at me – enforce.

It feels like the noose is getting tighter. Liking myself is predicated on not junking out on any drug foods. Now this abstinence even includes abstaining from Costco frozen yogurt and doing 20 minutes exercise on the elliptical??!! I don’t know if there is a bottom to this ‘abstinence’ business.

It seems I’m on the emotional ‘roller coaster’ again with no idea where I’m going to next. Apparently I haven’t arrived at God’s destination for me as the ride isn’t over yet. I’m so tired of … one… more… time… having to deal with all these uncontrollably, wild feelings!! It’s not bad enough that I have to deal with food addiction; I have to deal with all this child-abuse-PTSD too!!??

I went to church as usual this morning thinking we were going to be taught more about the book of Romans. Well it turned out that they decided to devote the whole service to fathers and what a good father was supposed to be like. I cried a lot feeling sorry for myself. I couldn’t stand sitting there listening to all the goody-two-shoes of it all. It was all very hard to stomach so I got up and left early. I didn’t care what anybody thought about my leaving. I know Christians aren’t supposed to swear, but if any of them didn’t like it, well… screw them.

I want to apologize for the quality of my writing lately. Since the writing of the above post, I haven’t been getting very good sleep and, even though I’ve seen my psychiatrist three times in the last two weeks, the medication regime adjustments for the Bipolar, have not yet helped very much.

I don’t think that the AA slogan: “Uncover; Discover; Discard” is something to try to push an alcoholic, who was abused as a child, to do. Furthermore, I don’t think it is a saying that Bill and Bob would have approved of either.

I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery. You must not have any other god but me. You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea.

These are the verses I’m totally laser-focused on right now. I am doing my level best to live by them. Suddenly I can see their profound meaning for our current times – as clear… as… day. To put it mildly, the rewards for making God my main man, are astonishingly miraculous.

(I wrote this e-mail to an AA friend/sponsor, after waking up at 4 am from out of the haze of several very tricky victim dreams. I have used tricks in the past to deal with these types of dreams, but this time they were so tricky that none of the tricks I’ve used, to neutralize them, worked. This is why I decided to get up and write this e-mail to my AA friend.)

I’m writing today because I don’t know what else to do right now in this addiction-free, obsession-free experiment. I’m tired. I do know that. I’m beginning to see that there’s going to be a lot of work involved in keeping my introject-father ** (the ‘father’ I still carry inside me) at peace. I need to both soothe and reward him… all…the… time… or he gets freaked out again. I don’t know if I can get rid of him altogether. I wish I could. The problem is that his personality encompasses 90% of who I am. He injected himself into me so deeply that there’s almost nothing of a ‘me’ in me. This is how it seems to be as far as I can see… so far. Maybe, one day, I’ll actually be able to be a ‘me’ and not just a ‘him’.

I used to have difficult feelings of aloneness and rejection because of being mostly alone here in blog-world, but this is changing. I still feel like I’m pretty much alone here, but since the ability to God/Self Soothe has ‘clicked in’ (by going through what I did the last 2 months) I’m definitely holding within myself, a dramatically different view of this aloneness. I think what I’ve been doing so far has really pushed me around the corner in my ability to adapt to inner and outer stresses. I really do believe I’ve come to a place where God is truly my ‘center’ – for everything.

Something profoundly wonderful has happened to me of late. It started in 1980 when I gave up my primary addiction – alcohol. Not long after I got sober, I began to lean very heavily on junk (flour/sugar) foods to distance myself from the agony of life without booze. I knew that doing the food thing was not good, but I was in so much emotional angst that I couldn’t stop myself. Two years into the agony of giving up this primary addiction, I had my first experience with your Christian God who (through the person of Jesus Christ) got through to me, in a very powerful way, how much He deeply, profoundly, and unconditionally, loved me. And He gave me the Holy Spirit in a very palpable way.

(the first post in this series is here: On Being A Social Outcast)
There is a link at the bottom of this post
that will take you to the next post in this series.

Here I go, morphing again. I feel like I’m riding the Matterhorn at Disneyland. The Matterhorn is a roller-coaster that you ride in complete darkness. You can’t see anything so you don’t know what’s coming next. This is how I’ve been feeling since the beginning of going through this crisis (my best friend telling me to shove off with no explanation) without running to any addiction of any kind; either substance or behavior.

My friend said good bye to me. We had been meeting every week; Tuesdays from three to five. Every week for three years. We studied Christian books together. “The Names of God”; “Lord Heal My Hurts”; “The Way of Agape”

Last week she told me she didn’t want to meet with me anymore. It was yesterday that we met for the last time. Now she’s gone.

My head knows why she did it. She had to. Her daughter had foisted three of her grand children on her to babysit everyday. She was homeschooling the twelve year old. The six year old had downs syndrome and ADHA, and the baby of eight months was a screamaholic. She’s sixty two and has battled cancer in her past. Last week the daughter moved to Southern California and out of her life. My relief and worry for her was finally over. So my head understands that she desperately needed a break. She said that first she was going to sleep for a month, then see the Grand Canyon, and then work on her book. It was completely understandable why she did it.

But not all of me is cooperating with the head.

I’m an addict, using every sort of earthly means I could lay my hands on to dissociate from pain. “Any port in a storm”, so they say. Alcohol was my drug of choice; then junk food, cigarettes, caffeine, crochet, TV, spending, wandering aimlessly around the house in an overwhelming fog.

But, one-by-one I’ve been barreling through each addiction with the single-mindedness of a cougar going after it’s prey. Since last August I have become determined to be addiction free. I want to run to the arms of the only One I can truly depend upon. The One who comes with no ill after-effects… God.

But now I am braving the first storm. And it’s a doozy. A hurricane, and I have no where to hide. No addiction to protect me from the raging fury passing directly overhead.

I lay on my bed, on my side, alone in the darkened room. Frozen still while this furious storm rages all around me. Monstrous claps of thunder pulse through my body.

In a thunder clap I am flung into a room. A voice screams at me…

Get in your room!!!

A lightening bolt of PTSD flash-back strikes and I am electrified. Then another, and another. They pierce me with direct hits. Then, in the light of a strike suddenly I become aware that I have been transported… to 1960.

In the instant flash of light I see something… no… someone. A small girl… huddled in the corner of her room. Her knees pressed tightly against her chest. Her arms wrapped around her knees. She’s in shock but… strangely… I can hear her thoughts.

What did I do?! Why is he so angry? I must be horrible for him to look at me with so much rage! I’m pure evil. I must be hideous for him to look at me with so much fire in his eyes.

She stares at nothing, almost not believing she came out alive through another savage assault.

Confused… baffled… bewildered… frozen. I see her in the lightening flashes. Petrified by what just happened, she does not move. And I can not move either. I am braving this storm. With each flash I get a glimpse. My eyes are fixated on her form and on her frozen face. I dare not budge. I do not want to miss a single second of this meeting. This memory.

A single tear runs over the bridge of my nose, then down my cheek to the pillow below. As I take her in my arms, this one tear is a miracle.

Together now, we survived the storm. We have both made it through alive.

Around my sixth anniversary sober, I found myself in such excruciating emotional stress that I could bear it no longer. I had not taken a drink of alcohol for six years yet still had the taste for it. As a result, I had what I now call a ‘Showdown at the OK Corral’ with God. I told Him, in no uncertain terms, that if He didn’t do something about this obsession for booze, then I was going to go back out again. So He had better do something… and quick. Boy! Was I mad!!

I haven’t been writing lately. The thing is that I have a sister who is critiquing my writing and I’m losing all my confidence because of what she’s doing. This is why I started writing on a new blog which I am keeping secret from her.

So what am I to do with my loss of self-confidence? Give my new-found fear of writing, over to God I guess. Though I don’t have a clue what He’s going to do with it.

I don’t know what to write about anymore. I seem to have utterly, utterly, lost my way with it. The lack of confidence is sticking to me like fly paper would.

That’s all I have to say for now. Perhaps any of you guys might offer me some advice this this? I’m feeling very sadly about it. I would really appreciate any outside help I can get. I think I’ll talk to my therapist about it too. See what she has to say about my problem.

So I went to therapy yesterday. I love my current therapist, Elizabeth. I love, love, love her. She’s so busy that I have to make appointments up to two months in advance to keep my same time slot. Where I go, you can’t claim a regular slot for yourself, you have to take what you can get. I was lucky. Someone had cancelled so I got to meet with her yesterday.

Because my parents were pretty ‘out there’ as far as religion was concerned, I have a very spotty religious internal background. My parents took us to the Unitarian church until I and my sister were about eight years old and my brother was four. Then this most liberal of protestant churches kicked us out. As I have talked about earlier, my parents had a very warped view on the spiritual, or religious, aspects of living.

I’m still abstaining from flour/sugar products. On the 15th it will be three months.

I was on the phone with my Overeater’s Anonymous (OA) sponsor last night and what came out was the word depression. She asked why the depression and I could only say; “I don’t know why.”So she suggested I write about it… which is why I’m writing about it.

So this morning I’ve been feeling sorry for myself… feeling like an abandoned little waif. This is difficult, writing so that you might read my stuff. I want to let my hair down a bit and allow you into my world. I wear my hair in a ponytail. It’s uncomfortable to leave it hanging down. This is difficult. Impossible? I will keep trying. Continue reading →

Once upon a time there was a train. On this train were many passengers coming and going about their business. Some were reading their newspapers; some where furtively ‘people watching’; some were just looking out their windows at the scenery passing by.

I went to a retreat with my church this weekend. I was so looking forward to going and making new friends with women from this church that I have just began to attend. I just began to attend there three or four months ago. I am not a ‘church hopper’. I plan to spend the rest of my life at this church, for the next twenty or thirty years or so I have left on this earth. I have been scouting churches since we moved to this new area two and a half years ago, and I think I have found it at this church.

I’m in an outpatient intensive program for food addiction. I’ve been going there three times a week for the last five weeks on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. But I went last Monday because my husband had a small surgery scheduled during my regular Tuesday time. This is where I met Dr Tom. I’d met him the week before because I wound up going on a Monday during that week as well. The man fascinated me. He’s into feelings…what they mean… what to learn from them… what to do with them. I think I can learn a lot from this man.

Many times I’ve heard in AA… “What you think of me is none of my business.” But I don’t seem to be able to jump that hurdle…yet. The paranoia of rejection blows mightily inside me. It shreds me until I’m stupid.

My father was a powerful, powerful, undiagnosed, mentally unbalanced man. In fact, even to this day, I have never met a more powerful human being on this planet.

When I was a little kid he used to twirl me around by my arm like a helicopter and beat me while screaming stuff at me. I don’t remember what the stuff was he screamed at me because I was terrified I would be killed =accidentally= by getting my neck broken.

I'm Michelle. This is my blog. I write about women and fatness, expound upon semi-coherent thoughts I have in the middle of the night, and offer tough love to those in whom I am disappointed; they are legion.